My academic interests are Russian literature from different eras. In classic Russian literature, my main interests are Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky, but I have also worked with Lev Tolstoi and Anton Chekhov. In Soviet Russian literature I am especially interested in Andrei Platonov, but also in other authors from its early period, such as Mikhail Bulgakov and, recently, Varlam Shalamov. As far as Post-Soviet literature is concerned, main interests are Viktor Pelevin and Pavel Krusanov. More lately, I have also been interested in indigenous Russian literature, Iurii Rytkheu in particular.

Within the field of literary theory, I am interested in Bakhtin’s genre theory, chronotope, and Lotman’s semiotic analyses of literary spaces. Lately I have also been interested in analyses of literary texts in the light of Modernism and Post-Modernism.

The author explores how the notion of a new man is developed in Russian thought and literature. He goes on to discuss how this notion is treated by the writers Bulgakov and Platonov in Heart of a Dog (1925, published in Russia 1987) and Happy Moscow (1932-1936, published 1991). respectively.

The author suggests that the Russian "short novel" - povest' - unlike the novel may be written as a tragedy in prose, being composed according to a "tragic rhythm" and representing a tragic Weltanschauung. Furthermore, he shows how the Russian writer Andrej Platonov based his own tragic vision as expressed in the short novel "Èfirnyj trakt" on among other things his knowledge of physics.Platonov's tragic vision is discussed in the light of ancient Greek tragedies and Peter Wessel Zapffe's theories of the tragic.

The author suggests that the Russian "short novel" - povest' - unlike the novel may be written as a tragedy in prose, being composed according to a "tragic rhythm" and representing a tragic Weltanschauung. Furthermore, he shows how the Russian writer Andrej Platonov based his own tragic vision as expressed in the short novel "Èfirnyj trakt" on among other things his knowledge of physics.Platonov's tragic vision is discussed in the light of ancient Greed tragedies and Peter Wessel Zapffe's theories of the tragic.

A central theme in The Novelistic Approach to the Utopian Question: Platonovs Chevengur in the Light of Dostoevskij's Anti-Utopian Legacy is the clash between two forms of discourse: novelistic prose and utopian ideology. The author shows that the anti-utopian strategies Dostoevskij applies against the utopian ideology of contemporary nihilists in the text of his novel The Possessed (1872) are repeated, but in entirely different forms by Platonov in his novel Chevengur (written 1927, published 1988) when he focuses on the Bolsheviks' communist project . Basing his argumentation on the theories of M. M. Bakhtin and others, the author shows that the different anti-utopian strategies found in Dostoevskij's and Platonov's texts are closely connected with the dialogic and spatial nature of the novel genre.

The paper represents a new reading of Gogol's "The Overcoat", in which particularly influential earlier readings (notably that of Chizhewskij) are revised and critisized. The main issue is a rereading of the inherent value system of "The Overcoat": What is good and what is evil?

Mørch, Audun Johannes (1998). Dostoevskij's ¿Besy¿ and the Utopian Notion of the New Man.
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DOSTOEVSKIJ'S BESY AND THE UTOPIAN NOTION OF THE NEW MAN. Since Chernyshevskij's famous "anti-novel" ¿Chto delat'¿, whose subtitle was ¿iz rasskazov o novych ljudjach¿, Russian utopian thinking has been markedly preoccupied with the image of a new man. The main implication of his book was that the essence of bright new utopian society was not in the props, but in the citizen of this society himself, the new man. The revolutionary nihilists that appear as characters in Dostoevskij's ¿Besy¿ are all possessed by different ideas of utopia, and in their ideologies we may also discern different casts of the new man. Still, there is a common principle behind all the new men in ¿Besy¿. To Dostoevskij, the quest for a new man is a pretence to divinity, and he recognizes such a pretence as the sin of hubris. The result is an inversion, or a negation. The new man in Dostoevskij's poetic universe is not divine, but either demonized or turned into a mass-creature resembling a herd-animal. The result, in other words, is either the opposite of a divine being (a demon) or something less than a man (a herd-animal), or even combinations of the two. Essentially, Russian utopianists dreamed of a ¿novyj chelovek¿ rising from the ashes of the lishnij chelovek.. The theme of the new man is later treated by such writers as Platonov, Bulgakov, Olesha and others.